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Have you ever been stuck somewhere and wished you had something to watch to pass the time? Or maybe you just want to share the latest picture you took of your children but haven’t gotten around to uploading to Flickr yet? Orb can help by giving you instant streaming access to all of your media stored at home from anywhere you have an internet connection.

Orb requires the installation of a server application on the computer with your media library and a free account from the website. Once the server is setup and running, which is very straight forward, Orb will index all of your media and create an online library you can access through any browser with the Flash plugin. Login to your Orb account and you can begin streaming your media in seconds. If you have a TV tuner installed in your PC you can even stream Live TV. Mac users don’t get too excited, this option isn’t available for you yet.

So what’s not to love about Orb? Unfortunately, a couple of things. First is the use of the Flash plugin. It works great on a laptop but leaves something to be desired on iPhones and iPads. Orb has created an iPhone app to allow streaming to your iPhone, but unlike the rest of the system it isn’t free. So far Orb hasn’t updated the application for the iPad but Expect that to happen sometime in the future. The second problem is the server application isn’t stable enough to be relied upon, it works most of the time, but you may find yourself without entertainment if it goes down.